Three Easy Ways to Come Up With False Suspects

Hello, friends! I’m on sabbatical for the rest of this week, working on some editing and publication tasks. New posts resume on August 25th, with the first chapters of my latest mystery writing resource: The Tangled Web: Thread-Spinning. In the meantime, please enjoy this classic post on how to create false suspects!

At last, the time has come: you’re ready to create a cast of false suspects for your book! We’ve spent a great deal of time thus far focusing on your Villain, and for good reason—the Villain’s story provides the central spine of the book. It answers the central question whydunit, and it provides the Sleuth with most of the challenges she will have to grapple with throughout the course of the story.

But false suspects are also important—and not just because they provide cover for your Villain. A great deal of the time your reader spends with your Sleuth will also be spent with these suspects—spying on them, asking them questions, trying to unravel their motives.

You may already have some great ideas for who these characters will be—but if you don’t, never fear! This chapter is going to show you three easy ways to brainstorm false suspects. Then we’ll take a look at how we can take each of those suspects and develop them into a full suspect subplot.

The first way to dream up false suspects is to ask yourself what kind of characters will showcase your Hook. Remember that your Hook is the world your mystery inhabits, whether that’s:

• the world of an industry, like a baking cozy

• the world of a particular time and place, like a historical mystery

• a world of your own invention, like a paranormal mystery

• the world of an unusual character, such as a psychopathic Sleuth

Creating suspects who showcase different roles within your Hook is a wonderful way to introduce us to the ins and outs of exactly how that world operates. Just as importantly, it helps you satisfy the expectations that your reader had when she first picked up your book and became intrigued by its Hook.

Let’s say that I’m writing a mystery set in the world of a traveling circus, in which my Victim will be a pretty young aerialist. She’ll die when someone sabotages the netting into which she tumbles at the end of her trapeze act.

What are some roles that can showcase this hook? Well, a ringmaster seems like an obvious inclusion. I’ll need a character like that for my Victim’s death scene, anyway—so why not build him out into a suspect? And how about a lion tamer? I think readers who are interested in a circus hook might really enjoy such a character. And what about the circus owner? This character would give me an opportunity to step away from the showmanship side of my circus for a bit, and showcase the ups and downs of running it as a business.

If you’ve been building up your Image Bank (discussed in Chapter 2), now is the time to pull it out and give it a read. The characters, places, and events you filed away there may spark ideas for wonderful suspects who would really showcase the many interesting aspects of your Hook.

The next question to ask yourself, when dreaming up suspects is: who needs to be there for the world of my Hook to function? Let’s try this with my circus hook.

Well, a stablehand isn’t exactly the kind of character I think of as showcasing the Hook—but there are a lot of animals in the circus I’m dreaming up, so there certainly needs to be someone to feed them and muck out their cages. There also need to be some equipment riggers—someone, after all, put up the netting that failed to catch my aerialist. And if the circus is traveling by train, there needs to be an engineer, and probably a mechanic or two to keep everything chugging along.

None of these roles needs to be a character, of course. Your book can function just fine with roles like this relegated to the deep background. Your reader will know they’re around somewhere—but she doesn’t have to know their names or see them center stage.

But it’s very possible that while making this list, you may find a suspect who tickles your fancy. For me, that’s the equipment rigger. I think it’s inevitable that he would be questioned by my Sleuth, and perhaps even framed by the real Villain. If he had a plausible motive for eliminating the aerialist, so much the better.

Ok, we’ve dealt with who needs to be there for your Hook to function. Now for our last question: who needs to be there for your Victim’s life to function? In this step, we’re dealing with family, neighbors, co-workers, and other intimates—some of whom will inevitably have a reason for bumping your Victim off.

Well, if my Victim is an aerialist, she certainly had a trainer. Perhaps that character could still be kicking around the circus. In addition to a trainer, she probably has a team she flies with—let’s say a big, strong acrobat who’s great at doing catches, and a young, beautiful protégée who sees herself as a rival for the Victim’s stardom. She might also have a costumer, someone who sews the clothing she performs in.

Most Victims will also have some family. It’s possible that my Victim is estranged from her family—after all, we’ve all heard the phrase “run away to join the circus.” But wouldn’t it be interesting if one of her relatives showed up in the days just prior to her death, seeking to reconcile with her? At least, that’s his story.

Finally, look back at your Villain’s Coverup Timeline, which we created in Chapter 31. Did your Villain bump off a witness or blackmailer? If so, this person should probably be a suspect—right up until the moment of her death.

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All right, let’s put together a final list of suspects for my circus mystery. Let’s say I’ll be casting suspicion on:

• a lion tamer

• the ringmaster

• an equipment rigger

• the aerialist’s estranged brother

• the aerialist’s rival for stardom

As with all the elements of my plot, I’m not fleshing these characters out much at the get-go. No names, no quirks, no eye colors. All I’m doing is giving myself a little bit of clay to work with—just enough for me to start imagining how these characters might act, what their practical interests might be, and what kind of scenes I might build around them.

Now let’s take these five characters through a few steps to build each of them out into a believable suspect subplot.

Step #1: Motives

First, let’s take each character and give him or her a potential motive for killing the Victim. Let’s say that my lion tamer had his heart broken by the aerialist, when he lost her to another man. In fact, perhaps he lost her to the ringleader. Although the ringleader initially fought for her affections, now he’s tired of her—and worse, she’s causing problems for his marriage.

We might say that the equipment rigger doesn’t have a motive per se, but there’s a possibility that he flubbed the rigging of the nets. In fact, he can’t exactly remember—because of a bender he went on the night before.

How about the estranged brother? Well, perhaps he’s reached out to my aerialist because their grandfather is dying. My Sleuth might wonder what kind of legacy the grandfather will leave—and whether the Victim’s brother is eager to share it. And as for my aerialist’s rival, her motive is obvious—she wants to steal the limelight!

Step #2: Subplot Endings

The next step will be figuring out how each suspect’s subplot will end. Why will our Sleuth eventually dismiss them from suspicion? Remember that the most common ending for suspect subplots is to learn that the suspect has a secret—which is not the murder. We’ll probably use this ending a few times as we move through our suspect list, but we want to mix things up by using a few other endings as well.

Let’s start again with the ringmaster. What if his secret is that he was meeting another paramour during the time when the netting was tampered with? This would give him a good reason to be rather cagey about his whereabouts on the day of the murder. How about the lion tamer? I think his subplot should absolutely end with his death—mostly because I think I can engineer a way for the murder weapon to be lion!

On to the brother. Let’s have his subplot also end with the disclosure of a secret: he came here to try to trick the Victim into signing away her inheritance. As for the equipment rigger, I imagine he’ll initially look quite guilty, and will even believe himself to be guilty—he’s sure that his drunkenness caused him to be sloppy in setting up the nets. However, he’ll be dismissed due to evidence when we learn that one of the ropes that was initially used to rig the net was swapped out for another, half-rotted rope.

Lastly, let’s dream up a secret for our aerialist’s rival. What if her secret was—she planned to kill the aerialist! She placed poison in the candy she knew the aerialist would indulge in after her performance—but it was never consumed, since the aerialist died before eating it.

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Step #3: Suspect Response

The third step will be to figure out how each suspect reacts to being suspected. This is mainly to keep all of my investigation scenes from hitting the same emotional notes; I don’t want all of my suspects to come off as angry, or all of them to come off as fearful. I want a little bit of range so that conversations with these suspects can feel different.

Let’s say that the ringleader is contemptuous when he’s approached by our Sleuth, the lion tamer is genuinely grieving the aerialist, and the estranged brother is shocked and offended that anyone could question his loyalty to his sister. The equipment rigger will start off angry, but he’s really just covering up for the fact that he thinks he’s guilty—by the second time we meet him, he’ll be blubbering out his whole story. And as for the rival, she pretends to be saddened by the aerialist’s death—but she just can’t pull it off. Our Sleuth can see through her facade to her secret glee at being elevated to top trapeze.

Step #4: Suspect Clues

The last step will be to create clues that help your Sleuth uncover what’s up with each of your false suspects. Fortunately, you already know how to do this. You’re going to do for your suspects what you’ve done for your Villain,

Let’s go through this process with our aerialist’s rival. Her Action Log might look something like this.

1. Purchased poison

2. Stole Victim’s box of candy

3. Treated candy with poison

4. Replaced box in Victim’s tent

And here’s her Narrative Log:

1. I didn’t hate the aerialist.

2. I didn’t poison the candy.

We should be able to use these lists to generate clues to the actions, and disruptions to the narratives. Maybe we’ll find a witness who will clue us in to the deep-seated resentment the rival bore toward the aerialist. Maybe we’ll find that the lock on the aerialist’s footlocker has been forced, or we’ll find a scrap of the rival’s costume in the aerialist’s tent. For help with this process, check out Chapter 25 (Action Log) and Chapter 27) (Narrative Log).

During this step, I might also decide to give one or two of my suspects a bit of a Coverup—actions they’ll take to protect their secret, or to prevent themselves from being accused. The rival might decide to protect the secret of her attempted poisoning, and one obvious Coverup action she might undertake is retrieving the candy. But what if she can’t find it? She winds up tossing the Victim’s entire tent, prompting the Sleuth to conclude that the Victim had a secret someone was trying to uncover.

There’s no need for every suspect to have a Coverup—in fact, more than one or two seems a bit over the top. Most of the stumbling blocks thrown in the Sleuth’s way should come from the Villain himself, for the simple reason that they make him look clever and proactive—and that, in turn, makes your Sleuth look all the better when she beats him.

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